Witcover: Post-partisan pipedream

While President Obama continues to plead for an end to partisanship, the outlook for it in the wake of his State of the Union Address seems bleaker than ever.

The Republicans in the Senate were given their 41st vote to sustain their legislative stonewall by the election of conservative Scott Brown in Massachusetts. Now they have all the votes they need to make the filibuster not simply a threat.

If they can hold their party solidarity -- and votes all last year indicated remarkable cohesion opposing every major Obama legislative initiative -- they can truly live up to the Democrats' label of the GOP as the Party of No.

The political question is whether that posture can produce Republican gains in November's midterm congressional elections, or will general a voter backlash against the congressional nay-saying?

So far, the public mood seems to favor the out party, with the growing populist view that the Obama administration is more concerned with Wall Street than with Main Street. Combatting that perception was a principal objective of the president's address to Congress last week.

His heavy emphasis on job creation, followed the next day by a town meeting in Tampa at which he unveiled a new $8 billion speed-rail proposal to boost employment there and around the country, is a clear bid to demonstrate a shift in focus to working-class woes.

Obama was in old campaign mode, to the point that he brought along Vice President Joe Biden, head of his Middle Class Task Force, and cast himself as a politician who has been "fighting for working folks my entire adult life." Biden's presence was an unusual bucking of the standard security policy against joint public appearances.

But Obama's speech to Congress had already sent a mixed message on whether he is throwing in with the American working class or still striving to work with the traditionally business-leaning GOP. His call for more nuclear power plants, new tax credits and an end to capital-gains taxes for small businesses, however, did not garner much initial enthusiasm from Republican leaders.

House Republican Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia openly scoffed at Obama's continued talk of bipartisanship in the State of the Union speech. In it, the president also reminded the country of the previous Republican administration's role in the economic collapse, as well as its paternity of two wars left on his doorstep.

GOP congressional leaders also did not take kindly to another point the president made in the speech: that now that the GOP has enough votes actually to invoke filibusters in the Senate, they also have responsibilities in leadership and governing.

Rather than Obama's mild coaxing of the opposition party to do business with him, many Democrats in Congress sound fed up with this approach. They want him to be tougher in using the heavy majority of 59 Democratic and Independent votes he has in the Senate and the 256 Democrats in the House to move his agenda.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for one was quoted in the Washington Post as saying: "We also have the responsibility if we can't find that common ground to stand our ground on principles. ... If we can't find a bipartisan way to do it, we are not going to say, 'Well, if it's not bipartisan, we are not going to do it.' We are going to do what we believe."

She speaks, however, from the House of Representatives, where no supermajority is required to end debate as in the Senate. There, the courtship of a few Republican votes must continue if principal elements of the Obama agenda are to be achieved.

In these circumstances, the virtual disappearance of the old liberal-to-moderate Republican bloc in the Senate -- seen in such less ideological and less partisan figures of the past as the just deceased Sen. Charles "Mac" Mathias of Maryland -- is sorely missed in the cause of bipartisanship.

Not only are all Republican senators thus empowered. Democratic senators willing to barter their votes for parochial benefits also must be wooed as Obama searches for illusory bipartisanship. How much longer will he turn the other cheek to those who continue to stonewall him?

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Fixing real problems, most caused by republican incompetence during the past 8 years, should be the goal of todays leaders. "No" only prolongs the problems and maintains a status quo -- that is patently unacceptable..